Owning Your Brand Reach
- By: Jessica Faust | Date: Sep 17 2019
In 20 years of
As an author, brand owner, and business owner (your author brand
Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sources are terrific for connecting with people and readers. However, you control none of it. We all saw that very clearly a few years ago when Facebook changed their algorithms and suddenly authors had to pay to connect with readers. And
Your website and email lists are the only
I can promise when I post that blog on the website I own or email it to our subscribers or when I post my videos on the website I own that my readers and authors can see it and find it. And can find it for years to come.
So while you’re busy posting on social media because you’ve been told that reach is important, don’t ignore the one thing you own and control. At BookEnds, we still put most of our energies into our website. It’s what we control and it’s the face of our business.
As one who is loathe to use social media because of the toxic environment it can engender, I am glad to see I have been putting my focus in the correct place as I build my author brand–my website. Thank you for reconfirming this.
Excellent advice!
In general, the main goal of any sns out there is not to provide you with a nice place to connect with your friends/fans. Their goal is to make money out of you, whether by collecting your data to sell to advertisers or by asking you to pay for increased reach.
And if facebook/twitter/whatnot all shut down tomorrow (I know. One can only hope.) and you have no other, independent place where your millions of followers can find you, well, that’s that.
By the way, since this is about reaching more people:
If you would like to help your favourite author on sns, the best thing to do is not just to like a post or a site. It’s much better to share/retweet etc. to greatly increase the number of people your favourite author will reach with this one post/tweet.
And you want to go full in and make your favourite author the next millionaire 😉 have a look at this video by Alexa Donne “5 Ways Readers Can Help Authors” (6:36), all of which don’t cost you a dime:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZUnd_74vT2k
As well as branding myself as a novelist, I use my professional website to promote and brand my protagonist. This works well for my thriller series, similar to how it works for genre fiction featuring a main character: Jack Reacher, Dirk Pitt; for example.
I do have a Facebook page and a Twitter handle; however, I’m not as active on these as I am on my own website blog. I did invest in targeted advertising on Facebook (+ Instagram) and LinkedIn (almost $1,600.00 USD in total). It did not sell one book, but I did establish a substantial following (not worth it).
I’m now using local transit-advertising to promote my book. This works well; it takes readers and potential customers to my website where they can purchase my books, allowing me to hand-deliver and not charge shipping (shipping for self-published authors is the greatest barrier to establishing readership; the cost of shipping one book can be as much, or more, as the cost of the book, meaning I lose money on each transaction). Since I opted to off-set print my book (2,000 copies) rather than print-on-demand (for quality reasons) Amazon will not sell it (they sell my eBook but said I had to publish with them in order to have fulfillment of my paperback…urg!)
I believe branding is everything. Thanks for this post.
Jessica, for an unpublished writer, what do you recommend they do with their web page? My web page is branded and I blog 3 times a week. Do you have any other advice?
If you recommend newletters, what should an unpublished writer offer?